We sure did, Mr. President. How could we have “misunderestimated” your regime’s ability to drive your country two Worlds back to the Third—not just a Third World country, but a full blown Banana Empire. As U.S. imperial reach is extended, the country is ruled by corporations through an unelected executive who continues to gut civil liberties in the name of national security with the complicity of a servile media and a one-party system disguised as two—not to mention economic and environmental degradation. Welcome to Third World politics kiddies!
Let’s begin with the rigged election of 2000. The son of a former President, “Bush the Lesser” (thank you, Arundhati Roy), had his brother Jeb swinging votes in Florida. The blatant politicking and nepotism of that sham was an electoral fiasco that probably even made Mexico’s PRI blush. When the Cuban government offers to send election monitors to Florida, something momentous has occurred.
With the worst still to come, Bush the Lesser assumed power and appointed a recycled cabinet that, for the purposes of this mental exercise, we’ll call a junta. I’ve always been amazed at the way some Latin American dictators—Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer Suárez or Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt, among others—maintained political legitimacy after a well-documented reign of terror. Bush’s neocon cabal, including such Iran-Contra scandal veterans as John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams, seems to have done the same. Abrams helped support some of the most repressive regimes in Latin America and helped conceal their abuses, mostly in countries dominated by the U.S. fruit industry—the so-called Banana Republics. The irony of Abrams’ appointment and title was probably lost on Bush when the one-time Contra supporter was given the post of Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations in 2001.
Then came September 11, sadly an event that is now used to justify the Wars du Jour. As in the Latin American dirty wars of recent decades, national security is now used to rally the population behind illegal and inhumane detentions of citizens and non-citizens alike. As far as we know, today’s “detainees” could be suffering the same torture endured by the desaparecidos of the South.
Nowhere is the junta’s eager disregard of international norms more evident than in the war on Iraq. As Hermann Goering said during his Nuremberg trial, “The people can always be brought to obey the orders of their leaders. All the leaders need to do is tell the people they are under attack, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and put the country under alert.” Using nationalism to evoke a war that gives a regime operational carte blanche is an age-old strategy, though normally not a favorite of Third World countries since there are only so many smaller, less powerful nations to bully. Argentina learned this the hard way in the Malvinas War.
As the war in Iraq unravels and becomes more about convincing voters at home that everything is Yankee-doodle-dandy over there, Bush too may lose. You can only land on an aircraft carrier so many times before its theatrical luster begins to wane. What’s next? Moving the White House staff to Baghdad—the way Colombian President Álvaro Uribe did when he recently moved his government for three days to war-torn Arauca to show he was winning that country’s civil war?
To help rebuild Iraq, Halliburton was awarded contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The fact that Vice President Dick Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton barely raises eyebrows in the mainstream media. Even before the war, more than $76 billion in Bush defense contracts were awarded to corporations whose former employees constituted at least nine of the 30 members of the Defense Policy Board, the government body awarding these contracts. Besides the perhaps more obvious issue of war profiteering, there is a simple name for such practices: corruption. It may go unpunished in the Third World, but at least it’s pointed out.
If these problems persist, political polarization could continue to grow as the 2004 presidential election draws closer, and the Bush White House may be in rather bad shape. Alas, the polls are only beginning to agree. Then again, polls rarely reflect reality in the so-called Third World.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teo Ballvé is Associate Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas
